Fun fact: Daniel Day Lewis is a world-champion squinter

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, There Will Be Blood, opens with Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) tapping away in the bowels of a gold mine, somewhere out in the dried-up West. Within a few wordless scenes, he’s made a fortune in oil, and is seen addressing a group of concerned families whose land he’s about to drill on.

He is, as he would say, simply an oilman — a very successful one. With his adopted son at his side (a cute face to seduce apprehensive landowners), he visits a small California community that, he suspects, sits on an ocean of oil. The town is easily seduced by the promise of wealth, but not enough to combat the Pentecostal fervour battling for the citizens’ attention, led by Eli (Paul Dano), a greasy-faced, unnerving boy preacher.

As Daniel’s grasp on the town begins to slip, so does his sanity. He becomes more of a force than a man, tearing through people and land in an all-consuming need to, well….

And there’s the flaw. There is no explicit reason for his destructive fury. In any other film, his lack of a “Rosebud” would kill the picture, but Daniel’s towering persona effectively sidesteps this misgiving, letting viewers construct their own idea of just what his demons might be. Having said that, it should be easy to read a political agenda into this tale of an oilman’s greed. Except that there really isn’t one — Anderson posits Lewis’s ambition with an entropic descent into hate and destruction, ratcheting up the tension for a few final, delirious scenes. And what an ending it is! There isn’t really a fitting conclusion for a tale like that of Lewis’s monster, but Anderson manages something shocking and necessary.

Lewis carries the picture — there’s the odd recognizable face, but the film is devoid of well-known actors. His dissolution is a harrowing study in pathological greed. People just naturally fill him with hate, and blood — whether it’s the blood of Christ, or the blood that flows through a family’s veins, doesn’t mean anything in the end. For an unbearably sinister and nihilistic tale, it’s also gorgeous, aided by stunning cinematography and Johnny Greenwood’s fantastic score.

There Will Be Blood is unlike any of Anderson’s previous films (those of the kaleidoscopic story and characters), and the most iconoclastic film put out by a major studio in years. It’s singularly haunting, raw, terrifying in its obsessive vision and the best movie I’ve seen in years.